“He’s absolutely right that there are differences in temperament [between liberals and conservatives], and science has been able to shed some light on that,” Professor John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, an expert on the relationship between biology and political orientation, said in an interview with POLITICO.

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On Wednesday, during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Gore argued that “human nature” plays a role in shaping political leanings.

“I think, first of all, scientists now know that there is, in human nature, a divide between what we sometimes call ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’,” Gore said. “And it gives an advantage, you can speculate, to the human species to have some people who are temperamentally inclined to try to change the future, experiment with new things, and others who are temperamentally inclined to say, ‘Wait a minute, not too fast, let’s make sure we don’t do anything rash here.’”

Hibbing said that there’s little evidence that political views are predetermined or genetic and didn’t think Gore was going that far in his comments.

“A lot of people maybe make the mistake of assuming that anytime you talk about [political] predisposition, that has to be genetic, but a lot of what’s in biology is not genetic,” he said, adding that biological and psychological patterns have emerged that distinguish conservatives from liberals, especially in how strongly they react to perceived threats.

“We notice liberals and conservatives tend to have fairly different physiological reactions to stimuli,” Hibbing said.

Rose McDermott, a political science professor at Brown University and an expert on the relationship between political behavior and genetics, agreed.

“Now what Al Gore is saying, another element to what he’s saying, is there are studies that say conservatives and liberals tend to have different responses to certain events and stimuli,” she told POLITICO.

“For example, conservatives tend to react, in general, much more viscerally to threats,” she continued. “[Conservatives] are much more likely to notice it sooner, to respond to it physiologically, more radically. It appears that liberals are more open to have new experiences, novel experiences.”

She said ideology is also, in part, “heritable, it comes from parents, grandparents, great grandparents, along a political spectrum. A very broad spectrum, like, from communism to fascism.”

McDermott echoed Hibbing in cautioning against tying possible biological differences between liberals and conservatives too closely to genetics. While she didn’t rule out the notion that genetics could play a role in shaping views, she said some people over-attribute to that phenomenon.

“The really, really, really important message for me is, it’s really not the case that there’s a gene for liberalism or a gene for conservatism,” she said. “It often gets misrepresented in the press, but these processes are so complex, it could never be something as simple as a single gene…it’s never going to be that simple, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn things about biology.”